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Videonale Award of fluentum collection

Sohrab Hura wins the Videonale Award of fluentum collection 2019. From the 29 video works nominated, the fourmember jury unanimously selected the artist’s video work The Lost Head & The Bird: ACT 1 to 12.
Stefan Panhans received a „honorable mention“ for HOSTEL.

The members of the jury of this year's award were: Inke Arns (Director of the hartware medienkunstverein Dortmund), Stephan Berg (General director Kunstmuseum Bonn), Nikola Dietrich (Director of Kölnischer Kunstverein) and Marcel Schwierin (Director of Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg).

In its decision to award the Videonale Award of the fluentum Collection 2019, the jury stated:

The Lost Head and the Bird opens with a short story: a woman loses her head and begins to look for a new one. A photograph of a contorted human body gradually appears. The fairytale of the headless woman, Madhu, then gives way to a flood of found footage consisting of photos and videos. Two images at a time are juxtaposed and thus come to form a third. The ever faster and more violent stream of images is accompanied by a driving soundtrack from Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd Bruil.

Like a machine spinning out of control, the story of the headless woman disappears into this torrent of brutal social media images, from which a picture of a whole society emerges. The artist’s video develops a convincing visual language to address the problematic of sexual, religious, and political violence in Indian society. Here the sometimes voyeuristic images play with our own voyeurism as viewers. The handwritten credits list all of the sources used and function as a reprise of the film. The Lost Head and the Bird is a furious video that confronts the reality of Indian (and not only Indian) society.

This is why the jury has decided to award the 5,000 euro Videonale Prize of the fluentum collection to the New Delhi-based artist, Sohrab Hura.

The jury has decided to make an honourable mention to Stefan Panhans, for the 2018 produced miniseries Hostel.

HOSTEL by Stefan Panhans - an extract from the Videonale catalogue
»Am I really yellow? Or perhaps green? Am I really black, are you really white? Or blue? Or pink, or perhaps small-minded?« These and many other questions are posed by the five performers in Stefan Panhansʼ mini-series. In a collage of images and sounds, visual symbols and spoken text, HOSTEL mainly addresses racism, prejudices, and clichés, digitization and the relationship between humans and technology, as well as consumption. The images and sounds appear to be arbitrarily mixed and only make sense again combined in the common message. In this manner, Panhans uses a dream staged in an exaggerated way to create a fragmented picture of the present that in a bizarre way reflects our zeitgeist. Between everyday racism and the general feeling of being overtaxed by rapid globalization and digitization, his artistic position helps prompt the required discussions and reflections. (Anne Fährmann)